The Asianization of Asia

Yoichi Funabashi

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1993

Article preview: first 500 of 3,472 words total.

Summary:  Expanding economic and media links are giving Asia what Asia historically could never give itself: a distinctly "Asian" identity. Far from a reaction to some Western impulse-colonialism or superpower imposition-the Asian consciousness is uniquely homegrown. It is animated by workaday pragmatism, the awakenings of a flourishing middle class and the moxie of technocrats. Though rifts in the region still exist, this new mindset gives Asians the confidence that-from human rights to security to political issues-they can fend for themselves.

SEARCHING FOR A NEW IDENTITY

Asia has at long last started to define itself. Asian consciousness and identity are coming vigorously to life. Western nations are increasingly impressed by the economic power and political gravity of the region. But Asia's success in the far-ranging and relative terms of global competition should not obscure those forces, in internal and absolute terms, now authoring a cohesive Asian worldview. The emerging Asian worldview is not one of imperialist pretensions, ideological fervor, totalitarian paranoia or superpower hubris-those ideas are viewed as retrogressive approaches that fractured the region for most of this century. The Asian consciousness is animated by workaday pragmatism, the social awakening of a flourishing middle class and the moxie of technocrats, although still tinged perhaps by anticolonialist resentment, racism and indifference to civil liberties.

This new Asian identity has social, cultural, economic and political implications. After decades of reserve on the international stage, Japan is now poised to assume a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, which would raise its diplomatic profile and influence. Efforts by Indonesian President Suharto to sustain and rejuvenate a post-Cold War version of the Nonaligned Movement bespeak a regional confidence and desire for autonomy. So does the conflict between Asia and the Western nations at the U.N. convention on human rights this year in Vienna. It made some participants, like Singapore Foreign Minister Wong Kan Sen, realize the extent of their Asianness for the first time. A few Asian nations, including Japan and Korea, supported the stand for universal rights taken by the United States and European countries, but India and the Philippines, two Asian democracies, were among those who argued that human rights must be considered in the context of the right to economic and social development. Charges of human-rights violations presented by other countries, they argued, were attempts to intervene in their domestic affairs. Most Asian political leaders maintain that the most desirable mode of democratization emerges spontaneously from economic growth, which sparks political consciousness among a middle class.

THE ELUSIVENESS OF UNITY

whenever unity seemed ascendant in the Asian world, history intervened. The splendors of 13th-century Asia recounted by Marco Polo were destroyed when they were plundered and exploited by Western colonial powers. In the 20th century the fleeting dream of "Asia as One" entertained by the Japanese expansionists was shattered by the Allied victory in 1945. At Bandung, Indonesia, soon after the end of World War II, a framework for solidarity among the nations of Africa and Asia was created, but the union, based on reactionary anticolonialism and anti-imperialism, was frail, as the China-India border clashes in the early 1960s illustrated. In 1964 China became a nuclear power. The passing of Nehru, champion of peace and harmony in Asia, sounded the death knell for solidarity among the have-nots. The same year Japan joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, solidifying its alliance not only with the West but with the nations of the North. Whatever semblance of unity Asia might ...

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